At first sight there are no striking features about the Middle West Side. Hand-to-mouth existence reduces living to a universal sameness which has little time or place for variety. In street after street are the same crowded and unsanitary tenements; the same untended groups of playing children; the same rough men gathered round the stores and saloons on the avenue; the same sluggish women grouped on the steps of the tenements in the cross streets. The visitor will find no rambling shacks, no conventional criminal’s alleys; only square, dull, monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of apathy.
The very lack of salient features is the supreme characteristic of this neighborhood. The most noticeable fact about it is that there is nothing to notice. It is earmarked by negativeness. There is usually a lifelessness about the streets and buildings, even at their best, which is reflected in the attitude of the people who live in them. The whole scene is dull, drab, uninteresting, totally devoid of the color and picturesqueness which give to so many poor districts a character and fascination of their own. Tenth Avenue and the streets west of it are lacking in the crowds and bustle and brilliant lights of the East Side. Eleventh Avenue by night is almost dark, and throughout the district are long stretches of poorly lit cross streets in which only the dingy store windows shine feebly. Over the East River great bridges throw necklaces of light across the water; here the North River is dark and unspanned.
What is it that has brought about this condition? Why is this part of New York so utterly featureless and depressing? The answer lies primarily not with the present or past inhabitants, but in the isolation and neglect to which for years it has been subjected. Much of the Middle West Side was once naturally attractive, with prosperous homesteads and cottages with gardens.[8] But while other parts of Manhattan were being developed as a city, the Middle West Side was left severely alone. It was one of the last sections of the city to become thickly populated. When the first factories arrived, they brought the tenements in their wake. The worst kinds of tenements were hastily built—anything was supposed to be good enough for the poor Irish who settled there; and these tenements have long survived in spite of their dilapidated condition because until recently there has been no one who cared for the rough and dull West Sider. East Side problems were much more picturesque and inviting. So our district has grown up under a heritage of desolation and neglect, uninteresting to look at, unpleasant to live in, overlooked, unsympathized with, and neglected into aloofness, till today its static population is almost isolated from and little affected by the life of the rest of the city. The casual little horse car which jingles up Tenth Avenue four times an hour is typical of the West Sider’s home, just as the Draft Riots of 1863 were typical of his temper.
The nationalities which largely form the basis of the population on the Middle West Side are the German and the Irish, the latter predominating.[9] Peculiar to the district is the large number of families of the second generation with parents who have been born and brought up in the immediate neighborhood.
The nationality of the American-born parents throws additional light on the subject of racial make-up of the population.[10] There were 81 American-born fathers and 92 American-born mothers in the 241 families. The parentage of 67 American-born fathers for whom information was available was as follows: 28, German; 21, Irish; 15, American; and 3, English. The parentage of 73 American-born mothers was: 28, German; 25, Irish; 18, American; and 2, English. The country of birth of parents of 14 of the American-born fathers and 19 of the American-born mothers could not be ascertained.[11]
We are accustomed to regard the German as the best of European emigrants. He brings with him a thrift and solidity which have taught us to depend on him. He has been a welcome immigrant as he has become a successful citizen. Yet here are large numbers of Germans living in a wild no-man’s-land which has a criminal record scarcely surpassed by any other district in New York. Surely this is more than a case of the exception proving the rule. It shows that our estimate of the Middle West Side is correct.
The district is like a spider’s web. Of those who come to it very few, either by their own efforts, or through outside agency, ever leave it. Now and then a boy is taken to the country or a family moves to the Bronx, but this happens comparatively seldom. Usually those who come to live here find at first (like Yorick’s starling) that they cannot get out, and presently that they do not want to. It is not that conditions throughout the district are economically extreme, although greater misery and worse poverty cannot be found in other parts of New York. But there is something in the dullness of these West Side streets and the traditional apathy of their tenants that crushes the wish for anything better and kills the hope of change. It is as though decades of lawlessness and neglect have formed an atmospheric monster, beyond the power and understanding of its creators, overwhelming German and Irish alike.
Such, in brief, is the background of the West Side boy. It is a gray picture, so gray that the casual visitor to these streets may think it over-painted. But this is because a superficial glance at the Middle West Side is peculiarly misleading. So much lies below the surface. It is obvious that this district has come to be singularly unattractive, and that its methods of life are extraordinarily rough. And it is equally true that hundreds of boys never know any other place or life than this, and that most of their offenses against the law are the direct result of their surroundings. The charges brought against them in court are only in part against the boys themselves. The indictment is in the main against the city which considers itself the greatest and most progressive in the New World, for allowing any of its children to start the battle of life so poorly equipped and so handicapped for becoming efficient American citizens. Not that these youngsters have not their share of “devilment” and original sin, but in estimating the work of the juvenile court with the boys of this neighborhood, it is absolutely essential to bear in mind not only the crimes they commit, but their chances for escaping criminality. If heredity and environment have any meaning, Tenth Avenue has much to answer for.